When Death Is Over
Number 16 of the eighteen stories in my debut short story collection, Mammals, I Think We Are Called.
The vision of a starlit falling man offers truths about love and death to the struggling residents of a run-down tower block.
Read an excerpt:
I feel him before I see him. The wind compresses above me. I look up and he is soft shadow falling.
Down and down he comes. Stars fall down after him. He is pain and shadow, falling, falling . . .
I reach out my arms to catch him.
And I feel the darkness. It sweeps through me like something crashing into being. Him in each of us, and us in him. But we will die sometime and he will fall forever.
I reach out and he slips through my fingers . . .
. . . falling, falling, a trail of us behind him, all the might have beens, twinkling, fading stars.
He sinks into the core and into that part of me I couldn’t face in you.
Then he is gone, leaving only the soft yellow of stars to light the way.
Order a copy from:
- Salt Publishing
- Five Leaves Bookshop
- Amazon
- Waterstones
- Blackwells
- South Africa: Takealot.com or loot.co.za
- Bookshops worldwide can order. (Penguin Distribution)
- Google to find your country.